Robots Are Our Friends

For a variety of reasons cultural heritage organizations often have robots.txt documents that restrict what web crawlers (aka robots) can see on a website. This is a bad thing because it means that the content that libraries, archives and museums are putting online becomes virtually invisible to search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, is less likely to be shared in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Pinterest and stands less of a chance of being used in educational sites like Wikipedia. The Robots Are Our Friends campaign aims to help promote an understanding of the role that robots.txt plays in determining the footprint our cultural heritage collections have on the Web.

Background

Typical Reasons for not allowing Robots

While indexing a dynamic site, robots can put an extra strain on the server, causing a slow response, or in some cases, pegging the CPU at 100%.

Some content is intentionally shielded from search engines to help shape how a websites resources are presented in search results. For example, if an organization has put a lot of PDFs online and doesn't want those to turn up in search results.

Sitemaps

"Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site." -- www.sitemap.org